SEO is vital for any business
But how can companies use it to stimulate growth?
Search traffic is historically the best web traffic you can expect. Google has been the most powerful traffic engine for years and, although its power has slowly declined over the years, no other traffic channel has come close to organic traffic.
Here’s how SEO can help your business in 2024:
1. Better understand your customers
One of the immediate benefits of launching an SEO strategy is the ability to better understand (and identify with) the user journey.
What difficulties does your target audience encounter? What kind of questions do they ask? What motivates their purchasing decisions?
A well-defined keyword research strategy can answer all these questions, and provide clarity for your entire team. Ahrefs is one of my favorite tools for conducting keyword research because it offers so much useful data, including common modifiers, popular questions, SERP features and so on:
You can also run your domain (or your competitor’s domain) through the tool to see your current positions in Google. You can also run your domain (or your competitor’s domain) through the tool to find out your current positions in Google.
This gives you a more global view of your keyword rankings, and lets you know how Internet users are finding your company (or your competitor’s) across multiple platforms.
2. Create more detailed buyer personas
Customer personas (also known as customer avatars) are people you invent to describe your ideal customers. Personas make digital marketing more streamlined and understandable by making your buyers easier to identify.
When you create a persona, you attribute certain human traits and characteristics to it, such as gender, income, profession, etc. Personas also help you create a customer-centric business model, the only business model that will make your company successful in 2024 and beyond.
To create a persona, you need some kind of data, and that’s where SEO-focused web analytics come in handy. Google Analytics contains detailed demographic data that will prove very useful when creating a persona:
As a business owner, you naturally put your customers first. So their feedback is important in helping you improve your product or service. To learn from your visitors, install the Google Analytics tool, which collects feedback so you can analyze it and listen to your customers in order to improve your website.
No matter how many professionals work on your site, visitor feedback is the most qualitative measure of your success. Using conversational forms on your site will help you collect even more data for your SEO campaigns and create more detailed personas.
3. Take control of your buyer’s journey
Purchasing paths have become more complicated over the years. Equipped with a variety of devices and tools, a consumer can start his or her journey on one device and continue it on another. He’s likely to turn to Google several times along this fragmented journey, and if your company appears for several queries in several sections, you’re more likely to win that customer.
A well-implemented SEO strategy is not limited to organic results. It aims to optimize the entire SERP (search engine results page):
Most of them offer companies additional opportunities to be found and engaged. For example, ranking in Google’s video carousel can help you achieve conversions, as videos present products and services in an accessible way.
Today, video editing can be done using an online video editor, and simple keyword research and optimization of the video page can help you get it into the top SERPs. How you integrate the customer’s online and offline experience is an essential cog in the customer relationship. Not every customer interaction with your brand translates into a sale.
Nor does every Google search he performs. However, engagement is a virtual cycle: the better known the brand, the more searches on the brand, and the more searches on the brand, the greater the visibility, ranking and, ultimately, clicks.
So the best thing for you to do is to understand (and match) customer “intent” to each interaction. Again, this requires alignment between your marketing, sales and customer service teams.
Using the right CRM software, you can consolidate the results of your SEO, email marketing and lead generation campaigns, create profiles of your ideal customers and buyer personas, and feed the information back into your content creation process to target them at every stage of the buyer’s journey.
4. Identify your promoters
If you’re in the SEO business, you certainly know your backlinks. But backlinks aren’t just about improving rankings. Knowing who is linking to you helps you build stronger niche relationships!
Ahrefs is an excellent tool for understanding your website’s structure and backlink portfolio. Essentially, your website’s backlink portfolio is made up of all the websites that have created links from their site to yours.
Buzzsumo is another great tool that lets you see exactly who has linked to you, and even the author who was found on that page. You can see which content on your site is the most popular, which is particularly useful if you’re integrating a blog into your site.
You can also set up an alert to receive an e-mail as soon as someone links to your site. This is an excellent tactic for building relationships: As soon as someone links to you, contact them to thank them, follow them and become their friend!
5. Better control of online context and sentiment
Finally, being present, paying attention to what people see when they search, and trying to optimize it, will give your company control over what people see when they search for your brand or important queries.
Imagine your current or future customer typing your brand name into the Google search box. What will he see? What impact will this have on the customer’s buying experience? Whether you’re there or not, your current and potential customers are looking for you and your brand.
The difference is that when you’re there watching them, you can improve your business and make sure you’re providing the best solutions to their answers.
Conclusion
Of course, SEO offers many other ways to help your business in 2024, including the ability to position your brand as a knowledge hub by guiding your content creation decision.
What’s more, SEO allows you to create the most consistent traffic channel possible. Organic traffic is one of the most valuable traffic channels thanks to intent matching (users are looking for answers and solutions, so they’re more likely to engage with your site if you provide those answers and solutions).
Customers expect brands to run websites where they can find out more about a product or service, get useful tips from your brand, or find time-saving FAQ sections. If you’re about to start your own business, think of “budget” ways to launch a user-friendly website, as this will help your business grow.
The best advice is to do your research, find the tools that work best for you, and never underestimate the value that SEO offers to the success of your business.
